Private Sector Development

Aracelis owns a hair salon in Santo Domingo. Like all the other owners of the nearly 20,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Dominican Republic, she dreams about making her business thrive. SMEs in this Caribbean country employ more than 500,000 people, representing a key driver of economic growth. To make their businesses grow and achieve their goals, all business owners need one crucial ingredient: money.

Fears abound that automation and other advanced technologies will lead to job losses for lower-skilled workers in emerging economies and exacerbate inequality. Each new wave of technological progress is met with dire predictions. The most critic argue that the unprecedented pace of technological change today will have more dramatic effects on the future of work as new technologies (including robots and artificial intelligence) are increasingly replacing more educated workers and more cognitive and analytical work. At the same time, many economists argue that technology adoption will significantly increase firm productivity and result in job expansion, at least in the medium run under certain policy conditions. The impacts of technology adoption on overall employment and on the skills composition of occupations are ultimately an empirical question.

Five years after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti’s capital and nearby towns on January 12, 2010, killing up to 230,000 people, the country continues to rebuild and the Haitian people show signs of resilience despite the current political uncertainty. Almost everyone has a story to tell.

On a Friday evening last November, twelve mayors from nearby districts gathered at the municipal office building in Tarapoto, Peru. Even though the rainy season was just ramping-up in this lush tropical area of the country, local roads were already being washed away. These mayors were eagerly planning for the local Provincial Road Institute to use their tractors to protect their roads to counter the negative effects of the rain.
One of them cried out, “How will my people bring grapes and coffee to local markets without good roads? Our products are going to rot and my people are going to suffer.”